2014 SP Guide Available Now!!

This year’s book runs over 123,000 words covering 384 starting pitchers across MLB’s 30 organizations in 351 glorious pages! Those of you who have purchased before will likely note that the editing on this year’s edition is unquestionably the best ever. The credit there goes to Darren Schienbien, who did a remarkable job editing the chapters. He willingly read every chapter ahead of time and fixed my many errors. He won’t be reading this opening essay before I publish, though, so I’m sure there’ll be 18 mistakes.

Doug Thorburn is back with his amazing pitch mechanics grades and this year he’s added a ton more. I believe he’s at least tripled his workload from last year. For those who might be new to the guide, when you see a mechanics report card, that signifies that start of Doug’s work. All of the writing before that is mine and then the card and capsule (and pictures to outline his points in many instances) belongs to Doug.

We aim to make the guide something that is not only valuable for fantasy baseball folks, but also handicappers and just good ol’ fans who want to be more informed about the game that they’re watching. While there is plenty of talk about a round to draft in or dollar amount to pay, the bulk of the content works on non-fantasy levels, too.

Last thing before I let you get to it: the tiered rankings will be sent out separately because they don’t translate well into Word. Look for an Excel file in your inbox very soon. It will also include bullpen coverage. I have purposely spaced the book itself and the tiered rankings because I want the content to be leveraged more than any list. The “why” of how I feel about these pitchers is way more important than whether they are #24 or #28 on a list.

The guide is emailed to your PayPal address after purchase. I send them out in batches, usually with a pretty quick turnaround. At most, it’ll be a few hours, but I’m usually all over it!!

As always, you can email me or reach out on Twitter with questions or comments.

Paul, a request for incorporation into your podcasts on BP. I’m usually multi-tasking while listening, so I’m not catching every detail. Typically you guys name the pitcher/player being discussed at the start and then can go on for several minutes using only the impersonal pronoun, “he.” Can you work on sprinkling his name in there with a little more frequency, or if that’s trouble, wrap up each summary by again naming the player(s) just discussed? The content and insights are awesome, but it’s a bit of a pain when I have to rewind — a very imprecise action — to find the start…I end up re-listening way too much. Thanks for your consideration.